The small crowd that had been awaiting their return—which included Khandelwal, UC representatives Daniel P. Bicknell ’13 and David Gonzalez ’11, and for short periods of time McLeod, Holoshitz, and Schwartz—dispersed shortly afterwards.

Around 11 p.m., Student Initiatives Committee Chair Khandelwal and Bicknell went to the Quincy House dining hall to do homework, according to Bicknell.

He said that he accompanied Khandelwal to the Spindell private dining room at the back of Quincy dining hall, where he saw Holoshitz, McLeod, and Schwartz writing on a laptop. Schwartz had encouraged a Crimson reporter an hour earlier to come to Quincy House, texting first “Just come” and then “Scandal.”

Both Holoshitz and Schwartz are registered members of the Hayward-Zhang campaign staff, the primary ticket opposing Bowman-Hysen. McLeod sent e-mails and texts in support of the ticket last week.

According to Bicknell, Schwartz requested that he leave the room, at which point he returned to the main dining hall, though Khandelwal remained in the room.

Bicknell said Holoshitz came out of the room shortly afterwards to tell him and Gonzalez, who had just arrived, not to tell anyone that she, McLeod, and Schwartz were in the Spindell room.

Around 11:30, Bicknell said Khandelwal came out of the room, saying that Holoshitz, McLeod, and Schwartz were drafting an e-mail which she had told McLeod not to send.

At 11:36 p.m., an e-mail sent from ucpres@fas.harvard.edu with the subject line “A Message on the Election from UC Vice-President Kia McLeod” was sent over the UC-general e-mail list. The message implied that, among other charges, vice presidential candidate Hysen may have had access to—and even tampered with—students’ votes in the election.

According to Bicknell, Khandelwal, followed by Kroop, re-entered the room after the first e-mail and encouraged McLeod to send out a retraction.

Khandelwal could not be reached for comment last night. Schwartz, when asked to comment on his involvement last night, responded only via text, writing that the claims were “sheer political maneuvering to distract from the improprieties of the election.”

At 12:27 a.m., an e-mail from McLeod’s personal FAS account was sent with the subject line “PLEASE READ: Retraction of UC-Presidential Email.”

“I would like it to be known that I did not draft [the previous e-mail],” she wrote in the retraction.

McLeod told The Crimson in an interview soon after that she did not send the e-mail, and had no comment on who was responsible.

“It was an inappropriate use of Eric Hysen’s and my name, and it should be completely disregarded,” she said.

At around 3:30 in the morning on Friday, after McLeod’s retraction e-mail, Flores received an e-mail from McLeod with the new log-in information to the UC president e-mail account.

Upon re-entering the account, Flores found multiple drafts of the original message with McLeod’s signature.

CORRECTION

The original headline of the Nov. 23 news article "Fallout of UC Election Colored By Allegations of Misconduct, Internal Dissension, and Incriminating E-mails" incorrectly referred to e-mails sent alleging fraud in the UC election as "libelous." In fact, because libel is a legal standard that requires there to be a provably false statement of fact, the e-mails could not be deemed libelous.